Libratus Making Headlines in Wake of Historic Poker Win

CMU AI Becomes First to Defeat Top Pros Playing No-Limit Texas Hold'em

By Byron Spice Monday, February 6, 2017

CMU's AI agent, Libratus, defeated four top poker pros in a 20-day tournament that ended last week. The global media has taken notice.

"A major milestone for AI."

"A powerful and rather unsettling proposition: a machine that can out-bluff a human."

"Libratus's main attribute as a poker player is that it's inhumanly good."

These are just some of the observations that have appeared in the news media since a Carnegie Mellon University artificial intelligence called Libratus decisively defeated four top poker professionals in 120,000 hands of Heads-up, No-Limit Texas Hold'em.

Libratus, created by Professor Tuomas Sandholm and Ph.D. student Noam Brown of the Computer Science Department, led the pros collectively by more than $1.7 million on Jan. 30, the end of the 20-day "Brains Vs. AI: Upping the Ante" contest at Pittsburgh's Rivers Casino.

"The best AI's ability to do strategic reasoning with imperfect information has now surpassed that of the best humans," Sandholm said at the time. He anticipates that the same reasoning ability that enabled Libratus to master two-player Texas Hold'em also can be harnessed to such real-world applications as automated negotiation, cybersecurity, military strategy and medical therapy planning.